biscuit help!

i've started cooking biscuits from this recipe, which is basically cribbed from alton brown and a couple of other sources.

http://www.howdidyoumakethat.com/content/biscuits

it represents the best i can do so far. which is still not good enough for me! don't get me wrong, i like em - but they don't get HIGH and FLUFFY enough. any ideas?

Try cutting the shortening in with a pastry cutter or two knives instead of "massaging" it in. This keeps it cooler for one thing, and gives you particles of fat coated in flour, which adds to flaky/fluffiness. Also, make sure your baking powder is fresh - it loses strength over time with exposure to air.

Some other things to try:

Mix the liquid in with your hands instead of a fork, and knead the dough for 1 minute. While you want to keep the gluten formation down, you do need some - the baking powder releases CO2 gas when first wetted and again when it's heated (that's what double-acting means), and the dough rises when the gas gets trapped in small pockets formed by the gluten.

Heat the oven to 450 deg F. Chill the dough in the fridge thoroughly (1/2 an hour or more) before you make it out into rounds. This gives the gluten time to relax and the fat to congeal into more homogeneous globules if it got too warm during the cutting/mixing/kneading stage and the liquid time to absorb into any free flour particles. A hotter oven gives quicker steam/CO2 formation and should give you a nice crisp exterior to moist fluffy interior finish. Bake them in/on cast iron if at all possible for the best possible crust.

jaq THANK YOU!! this is awesome. i am going to experiment.

how do you make sure the butter and shortening turn into small particles, rather than big lumps? crushing them with my fingers, in the flour mix, is what i do now.

I use a pastry cutter, which is like 5 or 6 parallel curved knife blades or wires held 1/8" apart. You can't really see the blades in this photo though. I've used the 2 knives method as well, which is more work but still effective. You hold a butter knife in each hand and pull the blades, parallel but counter to each other, through the shortening and dry mixture, over and over again. You can sort of see the idea in the 3rd photo here (from when we did the Lone Biscuit challenge almost 5 years ago).

Wow, that was before I owned any cast iron...